If you are not used to reading Hebrew with comprehension and with the ability to dilate the Hebrew from the literal meaning, or if you cannot read Hebrew and need a resource for daily davvenen, I offer you this set of texts, which I, too, use frequently for myself.

I translated the Psalms and the liturgy in the way in which I experience them in my feeling consciousness. This does not offer the ‘pshat’, the literal meaning of the words, but the devotional interpretation that can make it a prayer of the heart.

I suggest that you davven it first all the way through, reading it out loud enough to hear it yourself with feeling. You will like some sections better than others.

However, as you will note, there are 5 sections to this heart siddur. They describe the raising of your awareness from the realm of sensation, the prayer of Assiyah, to the realm of feelings, the prayer of Yetzirah, from there to the realm of reason and the intellect, the world of B’riyah and to the summit, the world of the intuition, Atzilut.

When you are done with this ascent, coming back to the grounded world of sensation and action, you will need to reflect on the stirrings you felt on the way up and ask yourself these questions:

How am I to apply this in my consensus reality and with my family and other contacts?

How am I to act in a manner that will lead to the healing of our planet and society?

This part is called the bringing down of the Divine influx, yeridat hashefa’.

You may need to pick some paragraphs from each plane of prayer if all of it is too much for you. Some days you may wish to vary some parts and say others. This ‘siddur’ is meant to help you stay in daily touch with God, to gain blessed assistance from God, to lighten your burdens, not to add to them. Then recite some of the sentences of blessings and proceed with your daily tasks.

May you experience
your praying
as a blessed meeting
with your God.

When Reb Zalman shared his siddur with the Open Siddur Project in 2009, it was the first contribution of a contemporary translation of the siddur with an Open Content license. Thank you so much, Reb Zalman!

Rabbi Dr. Zalman Meshullam Schachter-Shalomi, affectionately known as "Reb Zalman", (28 August 1924 – 3 July 2014) was one of the founders of the Jewish Renewal movement. Born in Żółkiew, Poland (now Ukraine) and raised in Vienna, he was interned in detention camps under the Vichy Regime but managed to flee the Nazi advance, emigrating to the United States in 1941. He was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi in 1947 within the ḤaBaD Hasidic movement while under the leadership of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, and served ḤaBaD communities in Massachusetts and Connecticut. He subsequently earned an M.A. in psychology of religion at Boston University, and a doctorate from the Hebrew Union College. He was initially sent out to speak on college campuses by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, but in the early 1960s, after experimenting with "the sacramental value of lysergic acid", the main ingredient in LSD, he parted ways. In September 2009, he became the first contributor of a siddur to the Open Siddur Project database of Jewish liturgy and related work. Reb Zalman supported the Open Siddur Project telling its founder, "this is what I've been looking forward to!" and sharing among many additional works of liturgy, an interview he had with Havurah magazine in the early to mid-1980s detailing his vision of "Database Davenen." The Open Siddur Project is proud to be realizing one of Reb Zalman's long held dreams.

[…] Siddur. And it’s ancestor is called “Yidaber Pi“, is in a smaller size and you can download it from here. They both have the morning davvenen all in the vernacular. Why [in the vernacular and not in […]

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